Pictorialism

A photographic movement called pictorial started in the late 19th Century. The purpose was for photography to imitate etching or oil painting and thus achieve legitimacy through that path rather than being thought of as 'snap shots'. Here is a good article with illustrations from the WikiPedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism
Alfred Stieglitz was probably the most famous of its practitioners although he was an American and the movement started in Europe. The movement ended or was greatly reduced in influence with the pure photography of Ansel Adams and his allies who insisted that photography was a fine art in and of itself. It didn't need to imitate anything.
Here's your chance to enter a photograph in the pictorial style.

Anything goes but if you use a non-standard program such as Corel's Painter, please disclose that in your commentary.

The more commentary on how you created your images, the better. Obviously this challenge can be met with store bought filters but it also can be met with no filters at all The two examples posted are examples of using no filters but rather simple manipulation to create the pictorial effect. See the Additional Rules for the methods used.

Capture date rules:

No restrictions.

Additional rules:

The images used as samples were converted to b&w with a boost in blue and a decrease in red to emulate the films of the late 19th century era. Then using Curves, the contrast was reduced by pulling down the extremes of both the right and left of the histogram. I added a layer and used Gaussian blur masking to make it less in the center and more at the edges of the picture. Finally I added a sepia tone using Hue / Saturation layer 'colorizing' approximately 50 Hue and 15 Saturation. The flowers were masked to remove 50% of the sepia in the center.

Your complaint (along with the complaints of others regarding this entry) will be
reviewed by the challenge owner. Depending upon the nature and applicability of the
complaint, the entry may be disqualified. In extreme circumstances the user who submitted
the entry may receive a ban from the challenge or series in question.